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When in Nags

Published September 23, 2016 by Quirk

This article was written by Mukta Joshi (Batch of 2019) and Radhika Goyal (Batch of 2019).

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” they say, but for those studying at NLSIU, Nagarbhavi (“Nags”), there are perhaps two Romes: One within the protected walls of our ivory tower: where we preach free love and advocate safe sex, and where more skin doesn’t (usually) mean less morals. Step out of the gates that house these red walls, though, and everything that is a norm within becomes an aberration.

Outside rests a world where ‘Indian Culture’ still runs wild, and wearing shorts and smoking is looked down upon. As Vijay, who has been working in Nags for the past 12 years puts it, “this is not M.G. Road after all”. Where the people who ought to be selling you contraceptives think it’s okay to refuse them to you saying, “Do you come to college to study or to do all this?” (Well, at least you know you weren’t imagining the judgment.) Dinesh, who has been running a pharmacy store for the past 5 years, attributes the difference in thinking to a generation gap. The other people we spoke to explain our behavior as coming from “modern places like Delhi” or “imitating foreigners” and claim to be able to easily tell the difference between NLS students and BU students, “It’s the way you all speak English and your clothes”, they told us when asked.

For many of us, like those of us who come from sheltered backgrounds in metropolitan cities, and those of us who pride ourselves in having the freedom to do what we want, the environment in Nags can become extremely stifling and frustrating. Nivedita Mukhija (Class of 2016) calls it the ‘Nagarbhavi Paradox’,[1] where one moment you are “reading a treatise on women’s empowerment, and the next … changing into full sleeved clothes” (because you need to go out and buy groceries). This is far from being a new development. Alumni of NLS have recounted that the area around campus always made them feel unsafe and rather uncomfortable. “We go out only as a group. There have been several times when eve teasers have harassed girls. In fact, most of us have begun to carry safety weapons for self-defense,”[2] said an NLSIU student way back in 2006.

…

Ten years later, the situation has barely improved. We conducted a small survey within the law school community regarding instances of sexual harassment around campus. Out of the 53 people who responded, 33 said that they have had to deal with instances of harassment, while 19 said that they have witnessed it happen to someone else. Instances of verbal harassment and lewd gestures were the most common; there were also attempts to take pictures and unwelcome physical advances. Instances of stalking were also disturbingly frequent, with nine women claiming that it had happened to them. The culprits could be shopkeepers who we interact with on a regular basis: last year, a first year student got her phone recharged at a local store and had to deal with unwanted messages on WhatsApp from the man who worked there. The could also be the faceless bikers we see zooming past us as breakneck speed, who often sneer at, stare at, and sometimes even physically hit women pedestrians. People working in the numerous juice shops just outside our campus also told us that the number of outsiders hanging around with their bikes and smoking, significantly decreases when Law School is shut, all the while implying that they come only to ogle us Law School women.

Our survey also asked what the women were doing when they were harassed – a question similar to the oh-so-common “but what were you wearing?”– in order to gauge whether it was our ‘abhorrent behavior’ that was inviting hostility towards us. However, while quite a few women did say that they were wearing short or skimpy clothes/smoking/wandering around campus at night when they were harassed, an equal number of women weren’t doing any of the above.

Unsurprisingly, most of the victims ignored these incidents. A few of them shouted back and a couple of them even chose to complain at the nearby police station. The complaints were not taken seriously. In the face of the language constraints, the fact that sexual harassment is still not taken seriously, and that very often women have no idea who their harasser was, women are often simply helpless, often accepting it as a normal part of going to Nags. This apathy, which perhaps exists due to the frequency of this harassment, is evident in the 50% of the responders who say that these incidents have not changed their behavior. Other respondents say that they no longer smoke as freely, go running to Bangalore University, or leave campus unless accompanied by a male. More importantly, everyone can relate to the sense of paranoia that crops up, especially after sun down.

…

It was with this information that we went around Nagarbhavi, asking its many inhabitants why they think incidents of sexual harassment occur. Notably, with the exception of a few small shops immediately outside campus, most shop owners claim to have never witnessed instances of sexual harassment or what is usually trivialized as “eve teasing”. Unsurprisingly, while everyone we spoke to agreed that sexual harassment is wrong and bad, many thought it happens because girls wear short clothes and stand around smoking. While this is certainly a form of victim blaming, most of the times it came across less as judgment and more as concern– the same concern our parents show us when they don’t let us go alone to “unsafe” places at night. For instance, the ammas working on campus assured us that wearing shorts is fine but warned us against wearing them outside because they don’t want anything bad to happen to us. For all our fight to be able to wear shorts on campus, (in reShortsgate) we ourselves, on countless occasions, have gone back to our rooms to change into something that would cover us up before venturing out of campus.

While it is easy to justify these opinions as well intentioned, it becomes a problem when women are punished for not following these prescribed safeguards­­– such as when the guards at Gate 0 don’t let us enter at night even when they can clearly see that there are drunk men right outside Roti Park because as they see it, we shouldn’t be out so late anyway. These instances might seem completely different. You may think that there is a difference when your mom tells you not to wear shorts and when the latest BJP MLA does the same, and you’d be right. But at the end of the day both attribute sexual harassment, not to the men who do it, but to the actions of the women who are harassed. The problem arises the moment you associate wearing shorts or drinking or smoking or going out alone as the cause of sexual harassment. That’s the base of the pyramid that is rape culture. A society which thinks rape happens because girls were alone at night, will necessarily produce people who think they can rape someone because she was alone at night. These two strains of thought are interdependent where each sustains the other.

To be clear rapists constitute only the ugliest manifestation of this rape culture. The bulk of it is filled with real estate agents who don’t allow men in women’s apartments, because the neighbors will think ‘otherwise’, or the law school students who dismiss sexual harassment as trivial, crack jokes like ‘all attention is good attention,’ think women are prone to overreactions and paranoia because lets face it, it could have been worse. At least nothing ‘really bad’ happened.

…

Except it did. This October will mark the fourth year of one of our students being gang raped by eight men in the forests of BU. It made national news: ‘Gang Rape in India’s Premier Law School.’ It was a horrific incident, with the rapists handing her ten rupees after the heinous act was over.[3]

Bangalore University’s response was equally horrific, where they threatened our college with the ultimatum of withdrawing their land grant unless we changed our behavior. “We are fed up with the way the students of NLSIU are behaving and also with the bad name our campus is getting because of them.”[4] It was us, therefore, who were the cause of the bad name – we were “too liberal”. If media reports are to be trusted, the locals blamed us for being too “bold and courageous.” Our own administration bought this narrative and instituted a curfew for all students. The student dropped out of NLS soon after this incident.

The student response was vastly different, where the shocked and angered community staged a protest at the Town Hall, and the security was ramped up, the police were more vigilant. But, as is often the case, 4 years later, when the anger is gone, the curfew is gone and the police are gone, the sexual harassment still remains.

…

Most locals will tell you that things are changing slowly for the better. Vijay tells us how he always asks girls to smoke inside his restaurant so they don’t attract unwelcome attention outside. On a few occasions when men follow them inside, he tells them that he personally knows the girl and asks them not to pass comments.

We also realized that people’s changing notions of ‘Indian Culture’ come at the heels of economic benefit. Mohini, who sells cigarettes nearby, thinks there is nothing wrong with women smoking, all the while vehemently opposing them wearing shorts. And Praveen, who sells bhaang in his shop around Holi, sheepishly tells us that bhaang in small quantities is okay because it is a part of Indian festivals and culture.

There were even locals around campus who thought that there was absolutely nothing wrong with anybody wearing what they wanted and smoking as and when they pleased. Their opinions certainly seemed a thousand times more progressive than that of the educated registrar of Bangalore University. But seeing that places like Roti Park still exist, which function as a no entry zone for most law school students, things clearly aren’t changing fast enough. Nagarbhavi has been, and still is, a rural area still in the process of urbanization, and the students of National Law School have always largely been the crème de le crème of the middle and upper middle classes. It’s easy to attribute sexual harassment to the mindset of rural India and class resentment but there are enough instances of sexual harassment in modern settings of offices and schools and colleges to know that the urge to harass is not an uneducated backward man’s affliction.

…

Given that the problem of sexual harassment isn’t unique to Nagarbhavi, and that even in Nagarbhavi it has been a persistent disease, it is all too easy to brush it aside as something that nothing can be done about. What we do notice, though, is that the problem in Nagarbhavi co-exists with a gigantic cultural rift, and it is, perhaps, by means of stepping into this rift, that it can be dealt with as well.[5] But the larger problem that needs to be solved is the relative silence that exists around these incidents that has continued to affect women in all of Law School’s glorious twenty-five years.

While most of us have been experiencing first hand the fear of violence and the restrictions imposed on us by the recent protests in Karnataka, let’s not forget that this dread and inconvenience is an “option” that far too many women have to choose, every day.

…

(We would like to thank Aditya Patel (Batch of 2016) and Sharvari Kothawade (Batch of 2019) for helping us conduct the interviews).

[5] This was also the principle with which the group ‘Blank Noise’ combated a similar problem in Yelahanka, where volunteers lined the streets with tables and chairs and invited passers-by to have a conversation with them, in a bid to understand each other.

8 Comments

Bitchface

Ok gr8. Congrats. Get where this is coming from. But, what is this paradox whereby in the institution itself you have rampant instances of sexism and going out is just a further aggravation of your safe space. Compare it to going out of your home and being in your home. Safe spaces exist where they are created, unfortunately. SO, what implication does this journalism have? Why are your interviews and surveys, etc. so inconclusive. If you’re putting in effort write something better 😀
For yourselves and everyone else than just reiterating the true facts which are not even exclusive to our own college.

Hey Bitchface,
What you are saying would make sense if sexual harassment was an issue on everybody’s mind all the time and we were all doing something about it or at least talking about it. Except coming in as a first year till my third year I have never seen women even mention this frustrating part of our lives. No matter how bad it gets. No one talks about it, no one cares, many men don’t even know it happens. Which is why when this was published a lot of people came to us saying this had to be written for no other reason than our experiences need to be out there.

Rape culture is built on a culture of ignorance about the problem and a culture of silence because women feel their problems aren’t valid enough to be brought up.

Yes, Safe spaces are created to give us a break from real life but that doesn’t mean we start thinking safety is something we deserve only within them. That when a sexist incident happens in college everyone protests but when it happens outside we go, okay cool sucks to be us. (which is what’s happening right now, and which is also the paradox we are referring to).

Also imagine if I suggested we do a ‘take back the night march,’ something a lot of groups are doing across India (look at pinja tod- they are doing one as we speak). Do you really think people would agree? No one cares enough. Writing articles like this which merely point out the problem and try to make people care about an issue like this go a long way in creating consensus for what can later amount to real action.

Everyone knows about the sexual harassment faced by everyone both inside and outside college. All I’m saying is this is weak, need better things out there and anything trying to achieve an impact or consensus needs to be pertaining to something more conclusive or redressable or anything.

I s’pose the only alternative is relocating NLS to M.G. Road (or nearby areas). That way the pre-eminent ladies of NLS wouldn’t have to change clothes to go out and will be saved by verbal harassment and lewd gestures (let’s be optimistic).

You want to talk about feminism, sexism, gay rights and freedom of expression while hurting the sentiments of those orthodox people, whom you bash, criticize and make fun of. “Oh..you go to temple..that’s sick!” And you believe that those traditional folks out there would forget these attacks on their faith and will worship you instead? No wonder, they justify raping as a ‘lesson’.

Let’s not just blame the Nags (another of your useless patronizing term) and think of why you are averse to the rural India, to the uneducated, to those who don’t speak English. You want to be respected, first respect your elders, your teachers and your tradition!

Okay first of all wow. I am happy you commented, because i know these sentiments are always lurking beneath the surface and people are just too scared to come out and say it. And so thank you for saying what others cant’ (even though you did it in a totally gutless way).

So just to be clear M.G. Road is not better, I mean Sweden is only barely better. And like i’ve said sexual harassment is not some uneducated backward man’s affliction and I have explicitly rejected the idea that there is some inherent link between the two.

But getting to the point, and this is no longer talking about nagarbhavi, I do not think tradition is something that needs to be respected if it still believes in notions that are sexist, degrading and demeaning to women. If my wearing short clothes hurts the sentiment of ‘orthodox people’ (lets buy into your idea of them) thats okay, I want to continue hurting them. Because in their world view, my identity as an equal does not exist. If their faith involves dictating what women can and cannot wear and do, who they can sleep with, whether they can work, whether they can leave the house, who they can marry, then I do not care how many times I insult their faith.

Except if your tradition believes that those who reject it need to be raped then you are a big part of the problem.

And coming to nags, do you really think the drunk man who groped me was doing it because his tradition was getting hurt, no, they are doing it because they were brought up in a society which fed into their ugliest side and and gave them a sense of entitlement over women and their bodies which allowed them to do that. If people think sexual harassment is okay, they can give you million reasons for doing it, rapes during conflicts don’t happen because the army has a tendency to rape, it’s because conflicts happen in a patriarchal world just like traditions exist in a patriarchal world. So please don’t prescribe any higher intentions to a bunch of goons.

Brilliant article, both of you.
But Radhika , the way you tackled “Jack’s smirking revenge” ( what a player) manages to explain, in five short paragraphs, exactly what is wrong with this country. Kudos! 🙂

Definitely something more concrete should also be done- something beyond the power of ink,well, keyboards.
But this is as good a starting point as any.
I hope you guys carry on with your efforts to bring this issue up, change the situation near your college, and perhaps start the ball rolling.
There will be men (and women) who will do their very best to bring you down, but there will always be those who shall be brave enough to light the fire.